Posted: November 23rd, 2016

What are the most important political messages of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution?

ESSAY TOPIC- 1. What are the most important political messages of Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution?
11) 3000 WORDS ( USE MANY REFERENCE)
11) it is CRUCIAL to show an engagement with the main text relevant to your essay. (i.e. if your essay is about Hannah Arendt, On Revolution.)

SOME READING LIST

READING LIST.
GENERAL;
Mark Lilla; The Reckless Mind. NB Chapters on Arendt, Schmitt and Foucault.
Richard Wolin; Labyrinths. NB chapters on Arendt and Schmitt.
Tracy B Strong. Politics without Vision. This has chapters on Arendt and Schmitt that are very advanced. Perhaps read them after reading introductory material and the texts themselves. Strong’s chapter on Lenin may be useful as background on Gramsci, and his chapter on Heidegger –whilst complex- may have some use for your work on Schmitt.
Yvonne Sherratt; Hitler’s Philosophers. This has the rather traditional chapters on Schmitt and Arendt. It is rather less theoretical than Wolin and Strong, and can be used for biographical summaries.
ARENDT
At the very least you are going to have to read Arendt’s On Revolution. There are copies in the MMU library (there are of all the books on this list). However, I’d advise you to pick up the Penguin edition of this text by her.
Other books by Arendt I refer to include;
The Origins of Totalitarianism (be AWARE of which edition you are looking at – none are “wrong” but each one has slightly different contents.)
The Human Condition
They are both in the library, and while I don’t advocate that you read them as a matter of course, you may wish to follow up on some of the issues we look at the lectures by a consideration of them.
Another of her books, easily accessible in a Penguin edition is Eichmann in Jerusalem. I don’t really use it in this unit, but you may wish to look at it.
The best ‘text book’ on Arendt is
Margaret Canovan; Hannah Arendt; a reinterpretation of her political thought.1992. (Check that this book is the one you are reading and not her earlier book on Arendt.)
Hanna Pitkin; The Attack of the Blob is very useful on the concept of the Social in Arendt.
SeylaBenhabib’sThe Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt is also well worth looking at.
The best biography of Arendt is;
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl; Hannah Arendt: For love of the world. Read the second edition, 2004, as this contains fully adequate material on the relationship with Heidegger.
Two articles by Arendt you should be able to access via the University website;
“Totalitarian Imperialism: Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution”.Journal of Politics,February 1958,
“Ideology and terror; a novel form of government”.Review of Politics, July 1953.
On council communism;
C.L.R.James, Grace Lee and Pierre Chaulieu; Facing Reality
Richard Gombin; The Origins of Modern Leftism (BOTH parts of the chapter on Council Communism are important here.)
If you can get a look at Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism, an infantile disorder, it is a jaundiced, but interesting insight into how Lenin saw Bordiga, Pannekoek and Gorter. Pannekoek’s work is worth chasing on the internet, especially any extracts from Workers’ Councils.
If you become interested in comparing the approaches of Arendt and Schmitt, you may want to look at the book by Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. This considers Arendt, Schmitt and Max Weber. Much of section 3 is directly taken up with considering Arendt and Schmitt together.